Assessing Human Vulnerability to Climate Change from an Evolutionary Perspective - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 66

4.2.2 A Structural Turn

In 1978, Gilbert White, along with two other prominent geographers, Ian Burton
and Robert Kates, published The Environment as Hazard . One passage from the
topic reads as follows:

When a Bengal fi sherman behaves like his neighbour in the face of the roaring cyclone, his
action or inaction can usually be illuminated by examining three elements in the situation.
These three are the ways in which people (1) recognize and describe [the hazard] (2) con-
sider how they might deal with it, and (3) choose among the actions that seem to them
available. (Burton et al. 1978 )
Kenneth Hewitt ( 1980 ) offered the following response:

This cool, reasonable view is (…) not only asking a lot of someone facing 'a roaring
typhoon': it is a far cry from the world most of us live in ordinarily. (…) Man may appear
in the long run to be a 'manager' (…). Few men have that opportunity. Human adaptation
to environment is characterized by great plasticity of the individual but primacy of the soci-
ety and its institutions in shaping the style of material life. Most people are raised and
conditioned to rather narrow roles in the life of society. We observe a close conformity
between a person's place in society and not only his or her behaviour, but what they know,
think they need to know, and value. (…) Does all this mean 'choice' is nonexistent? No, just
that it is highly circumscribed and unevenly distributed. More to the point, insofar as action
is concerned, choice is largely regulated by the distribution of power in society. Within the
general matrix of custom - the persistent, repetitive operations, the shared goals of a given
social order - power of decision and implementation is jealously guarded.
Reminiscent of Marxian structuralism, Hewitt's critique is indicative of what can
be described as a “structural turn” in disaster studies that occurred from the late-
1970s onwards. This “turn” was driven largely out of discontent with the lack of
progress in reducing disaster losses in the least developed countries (see, e.g. Box
4.1). Agents were no longer seen as having choice within a wide range of theoretical
adjustments to geophysical events. Rather, their choice of action was restricted by
socio-economic factors including “(…) their social status, level of cultural literacy,
access to credit sources, such as those embedded in kinship networks, technical
expertise, size and diversity of assets, employment options, household labour
requirements, membership in voluntary organizations, productive capacity of capi-
tal, and commitment to cultural values and religious conventions” (Torry 1979 ).
The observations made of the drought-induced famines in the Sahel described in
Box 4.1 served to shift focus away from irrational economic behaviour towards
structural explanations for human vulnerability. In doing so, they highlighted that
structural change is path dependent and often irreversible: “The collapse of the tra-
ditional methods of fi ghting economic problems arising from periodical droughts
may have played an important part in making the dry Sahel region more vulnerable
to drought in recent years than it need have been. On some of these changes correc-
tive policy actions are worth considering, but many of these developments are dif-
fi cult to reverse” (Sen 1983 ). Piecemeal technical solutions to such structural
problems, such as the drilling of boreholes, will often prove inadequate and may
even exacerbate the problem. Instead, “[…] problems such as deforestation, grass